Part 2

"No, he will not. But I say let's not hurt the guy more than we have to. I say let's go out and pull that thing's teeth and save Lacy the hurt of seeing you and Jenna together."

Lindsay frowned. He wouldn't say it, but Jenna did. "Jack," she said softly, "is that a soft spot that makes you want to keep Tom Lacy from hurt, or are you just giving arguments to get out there and try your skill against that bomb?"

"A little of both," said Grant cheerfully. "Plus the fact that he makes me uncomfortable, somehow. It always makes me uncomfortable to see any man so tied up in his own past emotions that he cannot see clearly."

"Skip it," said Lindsay firmly. "I admit that he is too bound up in the past, but you, Grant, could stand a little more of his sincerity of emotion just as he could stand less."

Harris had been quite alert, and broke in at this point. "All due respects, Grant, but you run this as though you were playing a game. I know why Lacy is that way. His game was for the reward, yours is for the game's sake. He saw everything he'd spent his life for go up in a flaming volcano. Years of living, of loving, of building; puffed out in a millionth of a second. Puffed out, obliterated, disintegrated beyond all recognition. Grant, have you ever loved anything, deeply?"

Grant nodded. "All right, fellows, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I don't understand Lacy better. I've loved, but I've never let it be my life. For when I've lost, there has always been something--or someone--else. Make off like my chips weren't in this deal, will you?"

"Still a game, Grant?" laughed Garrard. "A game where every throw of the dice is forecast is no game."

"What am I?" chuckled Jack Grant. "Just the baaaaad boy of the decontamination squadron? Sure it's a game--the whole thing is a game. And whether you're playing your brother for marbles or playing the devil for fame, you play to win."

"I say--" started Garrard.

Grant out-talked him. "_I_ say that I am the master of my fate. And if anybody calls me Invictus Grant I shall cut his throat. Or her throat," he added, turning to Jenna with a grin.

* * * * *

The door opened again and Lacy entered. "Quite a conference," he said. "Well, Ralph, where is it and what's to be done?"

Lindsay brought him up to date. Then they ran off the recording of Jim Roberts' unhappy attempt.

"You may just be overcautious," said Lacy when the recording had finished. "It may have been a circumstance."

"Unlikely. The thing is ... has too many facets. Jenna herself claims that a new item was expectable. Haynes had his statisticians at work, and their findings were that the quantity of late has been diminishing, which from past experience means that something new is due."

Jack Grant looked at Lindsay. "You don't suppose they're after the decontamination squadron?"

"If they were gunning for us," said Harris in a voice that shook with hatred, "they'd do it this way!" Then he settled back again. "But would they waste mercurite on us?"

"As a means of keeping production open, we're worth mercurite," responded Lindsay. "And it might take something more than the ordinary to go out and eliminate men who have made a business of defusing the things. Assassination is almost impossible.

"And," he said reflectively, "we may be barking up the wrong tree. All I know is that we've a brand new type, and as usual I've called the entire group in to get the initial factors all complete. Are we a bunch of persecution-complexes that we think they're after us?"

"No," grinned Jack Grant, "but remind me to tell that idea to Ordnance. Eliminating the decontamination squadron is like poisoning a city by shutting off its sewage system, perhaps, but it is effective!"

"We'll forget the personal angle until we get this one solved," said Ralph Lindsay.

"Well, let's go," said Grant eagerly.

"We'll take this easily," objected Lindsay.

"No gambling instinct?" queried Grant with an amused smile.

"That's why he's boss," said Garrard dryly. "Lindsay has neither an ax to grind nor an ego to build up."

"Huh?" asked Grant.

"Admitted ... and I'm sorry, Tom," said Garrard to Lacy, "that Lacy has his ax to grind. You, Jack, apparently get an egotistical lift out of this 'game.' Lindsay has neither."

"O.K., boss man," smiled Grant. "What do we do?"

"All the radiation meters we can pack into the battle buggy. Also we set up a radiating system near it. Then come back and we'll run through the spectrum to see. Now--"

"It's still in my district," reminded Grant.

"You're overeager," objected Garrard.

"And you're too complacent," objected Harris.

"Trouble with you," said Lacy, "is that you get too deep-set in pitting your skill against a mechanical puzzle and forget to tell us the moves."

Lindsay smiled sourly. "To finish this round robin, may I tell you _your_ faults, Tom? You are inclined to make a false move. Not consciously, but there have been a few times when you came out by the skin of your teeth, having pathologically missed a fine point, and having caught it consciously."

Grant reached in a back pocket and rolled a pair of dice on the floor. "Roll for it?" he asked hopefully.

"Never touch dice," objected Harris.

Grant reached inside his jacket and fanned a deck of cards. "Cut?"

"Games," said Garrard sourly. "Games of chance in a preordained world--Bah!"

* * * * *

Jenna hit the table with her small fist. "Stop it, all of you! A finer collection of neurotics I've never seen collected under one roof before. And not one of you dare suggest that Ralph pick a man. Haynes would be wild if he knew that Ralph had been put into a psychological hole by being forced to send any man into ... into ... into that." Deigning to name the menace was itself a psychic block, but Jenna did not care. Instead of talking further, she reached for the deck of cards. "The thirteenth card," she said, starting to deal them off, "One, two, three," placing them face up before her. "Lacy, hearts; Harris, spades; Grant, diamonds, and Garrard, clubs.--Ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen!"

The ace of spades.

Harris smiled, got up cheerfully, and went to get his trappings ready. Garrard grunted. "Games of chance," he sneered. "In a--"

Grant jumped up. "Look, Ed," he snarled. "In this completely preordained world of yours, how can an inhabitant know the will of the Gods of No-chance? What criterion would _you_ have used to select Harris, huh? So if nothing else, the laws of chance do that much, to at the very least tell us who the Gods select. And so long as we ourselves do not know the answer, who cares if it is preordained?" Having delivered this, Grant looked at Jenna. "Bright girl," he said. "An instrument, if you admit Ed's plan, of the Gods."

Jenna smiled. "You mean 'whom the Gods--select,'" she corrected blithely.

Grant hauled out a flask, unscrewed a one-ounce cap and poured it full. "Here," he snapped, practically forcing it into her mouth.

Jenna spluttered. "Thanks," she said, calming. "I know how Lindsay feels, and it is not up to him to tell us. But I don't care whether it is predestiny or not, and whether we're all non-gamblers or goody-goody boys. But we'll use this set of cards for any future guesswork. See? And, we'll cut, ourselves. See? We'll not make the mistake of forcing Jenna or Ralph into dealing out a poisoned arrow."

"I wish people would stop worrying about my peace of mind," growled Lindsay. "I admit all that's been said. I am not to undergo any personal emotional strain. But being psychologically packed in cotton and linseed oil isn't good for me either."

"And all over one problematical bomb," smiled Jenna. "Why don't we wait. If the first one was coincidence, certainly the rest, after solution, will make us all feel like overwrought schoolgirls."

Harris returned at this point. "Ready," he said with a smile. His eyes were bright, and he seemed eager. There was an exultation about Harris, a bearing that might have been sheer theatrical effort, yet it seemed as though he were going out to do personal battle with his own personal devil.

Lindsay nodded briefly. "Give us every single smidgin of information. If you scrape your feet, tell us. Understand?"

"I get it. O.K., there's been enough time wasted. S'long."

* * * * *

His voice came clearly, and in the dawning light, the automatic television cameras adjusted the exposure as the dawn came brighter by the moment. The battle wagon headed out across the rough ground where the teeming city of Gary had lived a hundred years ago. A mile or two beyond, the battle wagon entered the parking area, now cleared of its horde of parked 'copters by the fleeing personnel.

The ship lifted and retreated a few miles, finding level enough ground to continue observation, and Harris went on and on.

"I'm stopping," he said, and it was faithfully recorded. "I'm about a hundred feet from the crater, setting up detectors and radiators. Shall I drive back or will you come in and pick me up? Seems to be safe enough. He hasn't gone off yet."

"We'll pick you up but quick. Ready?"

"Ready. Everything's set on the servos."

"O.K."

They met, immediately whisked into the sky and back to more than a safe distance. Then they went to work, searching etheric space and subetheric space for radiations. They hurled megawatt pulses of radio energy and subradio energy at the ticking thing. They thundered at it with audio, covering all known manner of vibration from a few cycles per minute of varying pressure to several megacycles of sheer air-wave. They mixed radio and audio, modulated the radio with the audio and hurled both continuous waves and pulsed waves, and mixed complex combinations of both. Then they modulated the subradio with radio, which was modulated with audio and they bombarded it with that. Rejecting the radiation bands entirely, they went after it, exploring the quasi-optical region just below the infra-red in the same complete manner. They fired at it constantly, climbing up into the heat waves, up into visible light and out into the ultra-violet. They hurled Brentz rays, Roentgen rays, and hard X. They tuned up the betatron and lambasted it with the most brittle of hard X rays. They hurled explosive charges at it, to shock it. Then they sent drone fliers, radio controlled, and waved reflecting masses at it gently and harshly by flying the drones back and forth above it.

After three hours of this--and three more incoming robombs of the same type had been reported, they gave up.

"They're piling up," grunted Lindsay.

"Wish we could move it," said Grant.

"You always wish that. You tell us how to grapple with three hundred tons of glass-slick, super-hard ovoid with a high diamagnetic surface and a built-in radiation shield. Moving them is the easiest answer--and the one initially avoided."

Harris blinked. "Nothing else?"

"There's nothing left but to go out and pull its teeth," said Lindsay. "Nothing we know can detonate the thing."

Harris smiled knowingly. "Naturally," he said. "Their point in life is to immobilize Terra. They must not go off until they are ready. They're willing to wait. They found out we could detonate them and then return to work in a couple of hours with radiation shields. So they now get a fuse that cannot be extracted and cannot be detonated until they want it to. Give 'em one chance to prove one effective, and all Terra will be immobilized by them, and they'll drop everywhere. Also, maintaining the force fields takes a lot of valuable power. And if we shut off the fields, it might go up and then we'd lose the whole place."

"How I wish we could take pictures."

"Photographs?" asked Grant, smiling. "I saw one of them once. A family heirloom. Too bad, of course. But what do you expect when the whole world is living in a sort of bath of neutrons, and silver itself becomes slightly radioactive? After all, photography used to use a silver compound of some sort if my physical history is right."

"Silver bromide," said Lindsay slowly. "Look, Harris," he said, his interest showing where his mind was really working, "go out there and make a few sketches. Then come back without touching the thing. Understand?"

"Right."

* * * * *

"I am approaching the thing," he said from the field of action again. "I'm about two hundred feet from it. Working now with the projection box, sketching on the ground glass. This is a fairly standard model of robomb, of course. They load 'em with anything they think useful after making them at another plant, just as we do. The fuse--too bad they can't bury it inside. But it must be set, or at least available to the makers. If they should improve on it, it would be serious business to de-load these things to get to a buried fuse. Yep, there he is, right up on top as usual. Fuse-making has reached a fine art, fellows. Think of a gadget made to work at will or by preset, and still capable of taking the landing wallop they get. Well, they used to make fuses to stand twenty thousand times gravity for use in artillery. But this ... well, Ralph, I've about got it sketched. Looks standard. Except for a couple of Martian ideographs on it. Jenna, what's a sort of sidewise Omicron; three concentric, squashed circles; and a tick-tack-toe mark?"

"Martian for Mark Six Hundred Fifty, Modification Zero," answered the girl.

"Some language when you can cram that into three characters."

"Well, I'm through. Ralph, so far as I'm concerned, this drawing will serve no purpose. Use that one of the standard model and have Jenna make the right classification marks across the fuse top. That's a better drawing anyway. I'm going on out and defu--"

The flash blinded, even through the almost-black glasses. It was warm, through the leaded glass windows. The eventual roar and the grinding hailstorm of sand and stone and sintered glass tore at the ship. The counters rattled madly and fell behind the driving mechanism with a grinding rattle. A rocketing mushroom of smoke drove toward the stratosphere, cooling down to mere incandescence as it went.

Miles away a production official watched the meters on his servo panel. They were stable. The buildings held. With the lighter radioactinic shields, work could be resumed in twenty-four hours. He started to make plans, calling his men happily. The bomb was no longer a menace, and the mills could get back to work.

* * * * *

"Harris," said Garrard solemnly. "So shall it be! Well, may he rest, now. Hatred such as his--an obsession against an inanimate object. I--"

"Shut up," said Lacy quietly. "You're babbling."

"Well," said Grant in his hard voice, "we can detonate 'em if we can't defuse 'em. Only it's hard on the personnel!"

Lacy looked up and spoke quietly, though his face was bitter. "Jack Grant, you have all the sensitivity and feelings of a pig!"

"Why ... you--"

Lindsay leaped forward, hoping to get between them. Jenna went forward instinctively, putting up a small hand. Garrard looked at them reflectively, half aware of the incident and half convinced that if they were to fight, they would regardless of any act of man.

It was the strident ringing of the telephone that stopped them in their tracks; staying Grant's fist in midswing.

Jenna breathed out in a husky sound.

"Who was that at Gary?" asked General Haynes.

"We lost Harris."

"Same as before?"

Lindsay nodded glumly, forgetting that Haynes couldn't see him. Then he added: "Didn't even get close."

"What in thunder have they got?" asked Haynes. It was an hypothetical question, the general did not expect an answer. He added, after a moment of thought: "You've tried everything?"

"Not everything. So far as I've been able to tell, the things will sit there until we go after 'em. They'll foul up production areas until we go after 'em, and then when we're all gone--what then?"

"Lindsay! Take hold, man. You're ... you're letting it get you."

Lindsay nodded again. "I admit it. Oh, I'll be all right."

"Well, keep it up--trying I mean. We're tinkering with the spotters and predictors and we hope to get 'em up to the point where they'll act on those lightning fast jobs."

"We'll be getting to Old London," said Lindsay. "That's next. Good thing they dispersed cities a century ago, even granting the wall shield."

"Good luck, Lindsay. And when you've covered all the mechanico-electrical angles, look for other things."

He hung up, but Lindsay pondered the last remark. _What did he mean?_

* * * * *

The ship was on its way to Old London before Lindsay called for a talk-fest.

"We don't know anything about these things excepting that they go off when we approach 'em," said Lindsay. "Has anybody any ideas?"

"Only mine," grunted Jack Grant with a half-smile. "Something triggers 'em off whenever we come close."

"Couple of hundred feet," growled Lacy, "isn't close enough to permit operation of any detector capable of registering the human body without some sort of radiation output."

"Not direct detection," agreed Lindsay, facing Grant again.

Grant nodded. Then Garrard said: "I've an idea. But I'm mentioning it to no one."

"Why?"

"I don't want to tip my hand."

"Thought you weren't a gambler," jeered Grant.

"I'm not. I can't foresee the future, written though it is. I'll play it my way, according to my opinion. The fact that I feel this way about it is obviously because it is written so."

"Oh Brother!" grunted Jack Grant. "With everything all written in the Book of Acts, you still do things as you please because so long as you desire to do things that way it is obvious that the Gods wrote it?"

Garrard flushed. And Lindsay said: "Grant, you're a born trouble-maker."

"Maybe I should go out and take the next one apart. I'm still willing to bet my life against a bunch of Martians." Then he looked at Jenna. "I'm sorry, Jenna."

"Don't be," she said. "I may be Martian, but it's in ancestry only. I gave up my heritage when I set eyes on Ralph, you know." Then she stood up. "I'm definitely NOT running out," she laughed. "I'm going down to put on more coffee. I think this may be a long, cold winter."

She left, and Ed Garrard looked up at Lindsay, sourly.

"Well?" asked Ralph.

"Look, Lindsay, I may be speaking out of turn."

"Only the Gods know," chuckled Grant.

"Shut up, you're banal and out of line again," snapped Lindsay. "Look, Ed, no matter what it is, out with it."

"Lindsay, what do you know about this rumor about Martian mind-reading?"

"Very little. It is a very good possibility for the future, I'd say. It's been said that the ability of certain Martians to mental telepathy is a mutation. After all, the lighter atmosphere of Mars makes bombardment from space more likely to succeed."

"Mutation wouldn't change existing Martians," mused Grant. "The thing, of course, may either be a mutation that is expected--in which case it may occur severally--or an unexpected dominant mutation in which case its spread will occur as the first guy inseminates the race with the seeds of his own being."

"Right."

"You don't know?"

"No," said Lindsay. "I don't know which and furthermore it is unimportant."

"Might be," objected Grant. "How many are there and what is their ability?"

"There are about seventy Martians known to be able to do mental telepathy under ideal circumstances. Of the seventy-odd, all of them are attuned to only one or two of the others. So we have an aggregation of seventy, in groups of three maximum, that are able to do it."

"Is any of Jenna's family--?"

"Not that I know of. And besides, Jenna's loyal."

"They might be reading her mind unwittingly," said Garrard.

"Impossible."

"Know everything?" said Garrard, instantly regretting the implication.

"Only that Jenna's father was a psychoneural surgeon, and I've read plenty of his books on the subject. They're authoritative."

"Were, before the war."

Lindsay nodded. "You're thinking of some sort of amplifier system?"

Garrard nodded.

"I doubt it," said Lindsay.

Lacy looked up and shook his head. "It would have to be gentle," he said. "According to what I've heard, the guy who's doing the transmitting is clearly and actually aware of every transmitted thought that is correctly collected by the receiver. Couple a determined will to transmit with certain knowledge of reception, and then tell me how to read a mind that is one, unwilling; and two, unaware." Lacy snorted. "Seems to me we're getting thick on this." He arose and left, slowly.

* * * * *

Lacy wandered into the galley and spoke to Jenna. "Mind?"

"Not at all," she said brightly.

"I need a bit of relaxation," he said. "We've had too many hours of solid worry over this thing."

She put a hand on his shoulder. "Tom," she said, "you're all to bits. Why don't you quit?"

"Quit?" he said dully. "Look, Jenna, I quit a long time ago. Fact of the matter is, there's not one of us but won't kill ourselves as soon as the need for us is over. Excepting you and Ralph. You--have one another to live for. We--have nothing."

"Grant?"

"Grant will be at loose ends, too. Remember, he has been seeking thrill after thrill, and cutting closer to the line each time. This defusing is the ultimate in nerve thrills to him, pitting himself against a corps of mechanical experts. Going back to rocket-racing and perihelion runs will be too tame. He's through, too."

"You all could get a new interest in life. You shouldn't quit," said Jenna softly.

"That's the worst of it," said Tom Lacy looking down at her. "I quit a long time ago. It's the starting-up that I fear."

"I don't follow."

"I think of Irene--and Little Fellow--and I know that when that area went up, my life ended. I've never had Harris' psychopathic hatred of the things. I've just felt that I'd like death, but want to go out doing my part. I have a life-long training against suicide per se, but I euphemize it by taunting death with the decontamination squadron."

"Yes?" said Jenna. She knew more was to come.

"Alone I'm all right. Then I see you and Ralph. I feel a resentment--not against you, or Ralph, but against Fate or Kismet or whatever Gods there be that they should deny me and give to you freely. It's not right that I feel this way. Life is like that." He quoted bitterly: "'Them as has, gits!'"

"Tom, I swear that if it were mine to do, I'd give you all the things you lost--return them."

He nodded. "Giving me wouldn't do," he said in self-reflection. "I'd want return--and that is impossible."

Jenna knew well enough not to say the trite remark about Time being the Great Healer. "Poor Tom," she said gently. Maternally, she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. An inner yearning touched him and opened a brief door of forgetfulness. He tightened his arms about her for a moment and as her face came up, he kissed her with a sudden warmth. In Jenna, mixed feelings, conflicting emotions burned away by his warmth. She responded instinctively and in the brief moment removed some of the torture of the lonely, hating days.

Then as the mixed thoughts cleared, Lacy found himself able to think more clearly. Though still flushed, he loosened his tight hold upon her waist, and as he relaxed, Jenna changed from the yielding softness of her to a woman more remote. Her eyes opened, and her arms came down from about his neck and she stepped back, breathing fully.

"Sorry, Jenna--"

She laughed. It was not a laugh that meant derision; in fact it was a laugh reassuring to him, as she'd intended it to be. "Don't be sorry," she said softly. "You've committed no crime, I understand."

He nodded. "I was, sort of, kind of--"

"Tom," she said seriously, "there's a lot of good therapy in a kiss. So far as I know, you needed some, and I gave it to you, freely and gladly. I'll ... do it again ... when it's needed." Then she looked away, shyly.